Sexually exclusivity for men, as the study notes, does not obviously contribute to the evolutionary success of high IQ males — in fact, just the opposite. (Though the truth about the relationship between evolutionary success and high male IQ may be more subtle). Women, I should add, are also more likely to be atheists and liberals if they are very smart, but are not more or less likely to be sexually exclusive. (What to make of that is anybody’s guess.) I find this to be delightful, strangely comforting, and puzzling, so I have been asking friends, relatives and fellow professors what they make of this new statistic.

Here are some of the theories that have been advanced:

(1) The smarter men are, the less psychologically stable they are. They find that stability in a partner, and so quite sensibly avoid losing their psychological footing by playing around. (This is my own theory, which tells you something about Clancy.)

(2) The smarter men are, the more they value financial success. Cheating, as anyone can tell you, is always expensive (hotels, flowers, champagne, shoes), and sometimes ruinously so (divorce, child support). So, smart men keep their pants zipped and their wallets in their pockets. (If this is the reason, it depresses me. But several male friends suggested it.)

(3) The smarter men are, the greater respect they have for rules and promises. I find this to be hilariously implausible, but remember, I know a lot of philosophers. Smart men, in short, have a higher inclination to be moral (Nietzsche is rolling in his grave–though of course in his own life he followed a very strict moral code. In fact he complained that when Lou Salome told him he had no morality, he misunderstood her to mean that she had, like him, a much higher and stricter morality.)

(4) Smarter men have lower sex drives. (Suggested by several female friends of mine, and no males.) I refuse to countenance this impertinent suggestion.

(5) Intelligent men are less likely to view women as “sex objects,” and in general tend to have greater respect for women (and what about gay men? I wonder). This is my wife’s view, I am pleased to say, but she may only have been flattering me.

(6) Intelligent men tend to be less self-confident with women, to flirt less often and less effectively, and generally are more prone to self-doubt and shyness. These same intelligent men are astonishingly dumb when it comes to recognizing sexual invitations from women. (Many female friends offered this view, which seems to me to be highly plausible).

(7) Adam Phillips — I did not speak with him directly, I should say — argues that monogamy is a way of reducing the number of versions of ourselves, “a way of convincing ourselves that some versions are truer than others–that some are special,” as he writes in “On Monogamy.” This relates, I think, to the view I offered in (1). On this account, men with higher IQs feel a greater need for “a special self” or (stronger) an “authentic self,” and the naivete that comes along with such a need might explain why the need was peculiar to men and not women (at least, vis a vis sexual exclusivity and IQ). Women seem, speaking very broadly and thus perhaps stupidly, to be more sophisticated than men on the question of “what it is to be a self” (just read Irigaray’s “This Sex Which is Not One,” and she will convince you that, at the very least, women are more subtle and complex when it comes to their thinking about selfhood).

(8) Okay, fellas: if you’re smart and monogamous, you are not going to like this one. I have been reading all over the place about this phenomenon, and though very little research has been done on it — the study with which I began really is groundbreaking — here is some speculation from the New York Times’ hot-babe evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson: “Perhaps it will turn out…that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men’s wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds, whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity and jealousy and turn all lovey-dovey after sex.” (You can read more about this in her best-selling book “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation,” in the section Till Death Do Us Part.”) Of course it does not follow from this that smart men have small testicles, or that dumb men are luckily endowed: Aristotle, we know, was very unfortunate in the “does size matter?” department, and the wise, peaceable mountain gorilla tends to be both very monogamous, and endowed with unusually small testicles. But the interesting connection is still worth mentioning.

That’s enough theories to get the discussion started, in any event. I hope readers will be tempted to weigh in on this one. I’m writing a book about sex right now, and I need all the help I can get. (With the book, that is; my wife takes care of the sex end of things very nicely, thank you very much.)

Photo by kainr

Sartre called this “The Look,” when you realize, with a kind of shock and terror, that another universe is there beside you, one you can never grasp, that everywhere that universe is oriented is oriented away from you, so that just as these are your walls, your buttons, your elevator door, so are they someone else’s, but differently, and his owning that universe creates a kind of vortex that whirls the universe away from you. The Look was there in the way we looked at one another–I saw it, and he saw it, too. But it wasn’t just The Look, either. It wasn’t even that each of us realized that the other was having this experience of The Look, though it was obvious we both were (though I don’t know if this guy ever read Sartre; he’s not such standard fare as he once was, and maybe especially not in Kansas City, Missouri–we have a different “The Look,” which is the look you give a proper pulled pork sandwich). Anyway, you don’t have to read Sartre to have the experience. Sartre was describing the experience, not discovering or creating it.

There was also a poignancy in the look we gave one another, as though we were meant to be friends and missed the opportunity at an earlier point in our lives; as though, if we fell to talking, we would have uncovered truths in common, and maybe would have understood one another. And then we looked away. He got off the elevator before I did, and when he did, I wanted to reach out or call out to him, but naturally I didn’t. He didn’t look back.

In “Being and Time,” Sartre explained that part of The Look’s power derives from the other person’s attempt to appropriate you into their universe, to make you a part of their world. In looking at you, I try to take possession of you. But I think Sartre’s analysis is misguided–perhaps by his own sexually notorious lifestyle; he took possession of many, which was a source of constant misery to his partner Simone, though she took possession of as many as he did–in that it fails to acknowledge that when we look at one another and see into one another in a mysterious way, we don’t just make one another a part of our own individual universes, our universes somehow mingle (curiously, they have the right idea in the concept of “I see you” that is tossed around in the movie “Avatar”).

Irving Singer calls this “the look of love,” and uses the metaphor of the look between a child and its mother; Martin Buber thought that this way of looking revealed the presence of God. (Buber argued that if you looked at a tree in a truly contemplative way, you would understand that the tree was, so to speak, looking back at you, and looking back at you with love and respect. This sounds a bit crazy, or like Buber took a lot of acid when he went back to the Holy Land, but try it sometime, when you have time to sit and be very calm: The tree is not you, but you get the feeling it knows you are there. Well, it’s worth a shot.)

When two lovers first let themselves really look at one another–this is less common than we suppose it is–the same thing is happening: There is shared recognition, not just of otherness, but of togetherness. That kind of intimacy is frightening, just as this unexpected shock of intimacy between myself and this total stranger on the elevator was frightening, and felt like a loss afterward. This is one reason that the looks of lovers matter as much as they do, and why the betrayal of love has an oddly visual character. Adam Phillips gets it just right in his discussion of jealousy (another diabolically visual phenomenon: think how much hangs on looking for the jealous lover) in his book “Monogamy”: “But if jealousy is the way I notice that the other person is not my sole possession–not my thing–then I need to be betrayed to break out of the magic circle of myself. While betrayal makes us too real to each other, its impossibility makes us invisible.”

Unless we can be betrayed, we cannot see one another at all; it is in looking at one another and seeing one another that we become more than who we are. Let’s hope that Phillips is wrong when he suggests that betrayal is a prerequisite for breaking out of our own little circles–I suspect Freud and Sartre both would have agreed (on this account, betrayal moves us from understanding love as identification to love as transference)–but he gets the triangular phenomenology of visibility, love and selfhood exactly right.

Singer argues that, at the end of the day, love is a kind of acceptance of another person–not a trivial acceptance, but an acceptance that goes all the way down–and as good as that is, he still misses part of what is happening in that look. What he is missing, and what I felt I lost, I think, is the way in which who we are and how we understand ourselves is through the eyes of other people. Every time I look at you and you look back at me, a new me appears, very similar to the old me but also full of of different possibilities and whole futures I had not imagined, lives I might lead and now won’t lead when you look away. Our future is defined, even in the simplest and most obvious ways, by the people we decide to bring into our our universes (and when we step into theirs). Think how different your life would be if it weren’t for certain friends, particular mentors–not to mention parents, siblings, children.

But your connection with these people isn’t merely what you have enjoyed and suffered together, or even what you have chosen together (the exercise of one’s freedom in conjunction with another’s–the “let’s do this together”–is one of the most satisfying aspects of long-term partnerships of any kind, romantic or otherwise). It is also, and maybe more fundamentally, this recognition, this look, this vibration in the air as though mental electricity were being exchanged, electricity charged with possibility. You want to swallow. The soles of your feet may tingle. Or a chill might run up your spine like when you read a line of real poetry. There is someone else there, and that someone is not you, but somehow also is you, too, and who you might have been, or might yet become.

Photo by kio

These three students were in many ways quite similar: all were unusually bright, highly motivated, upper middle class, talented, male, and (at least in the case of both of my students) a bit uneasy, a bit more eager to prove themselves than the other students around them. Or I could be simply projecting that anxiety onto them now, as a consequence of their action. The first friend I ever had who killed himself was a kid named Ben who was in I.B. Physics with me at Western Canada High School in Calgary, Alberta. We competed with one another in physics, the class that really counted for the I.B. kids. Before that, my earlier experiences with suicide were when my stepbrother Paul leapt off a building in Calgary, when I was seven, and when my stepsister Lisa tried the same thing, a year or so later. Paul died; Lisa lived, with a ruptured spleen.

As readers of my column know, I tried to kill myself a little over a year ago. People asked me, “How could you? With a wife and three daughters? Don’t you know how much they need you? Think of how much harm you would be doing to them. How could you be so selfish?” Of course it’s the right question, and it is fair to ask these young men how they failed to see how much promise they had, how loved they were, how much pain they would leave behind for the people who love them. It is part of the hellish, circular logic of the suicide (at least, in my own experience): that you know these things as you go through the short ritual that precedes your failed or successful attempt, and that knowledge is further confirmation that you are not the sort of person who ought to be alive. You’re not thinking, “I’ll show them,” but rather, “They’ll be better off without me”–and the fact of the harm this will cause them is only further proof of the fact that you are the kind of person they should not be exposed to. You know something about yourself that they must not know: here’s the way to keep it forever hidden, or to finally expose it. Selfishness is part of it–and, usually, unbearable suffering, suffering that is profoundly wrapped up with selfhood.  For Kierkegaard, there was a deep split in the very center of the self that was experienced as anxiety, and the deeper we fell into the black chasm of the self, the more that anxiety threatened to overwhelm us (and our only hope of being made whole, he thought, was through faith).

The best contemporary literature on suicide tells us that the urge to kill oneself, if the means are not available, often passes, and for good (Scott Anderson wrote a very nice summary of this literature in the New York Times). But the determined suicide finds a way. (One always has this nasty desire to ask the failed suicide: “But did you really mean to do it?” just as the failed suicide always has this perverse self-doubt: “But was I truly trying or not?”) When I was in the hospital after my own attempt, there was a young girl there–she was nineteen, but if you met her, you would have called her a girl, too–who was back in after her fifth suicide attempt. She had tried various things: pills, slashing her wrists, hanging herself. We talked about the feeling of not wanting to live–everyone one of us, I think, has had the experience of feeling “this is simply too much, I can’t bear it anymore”–but also the different and much more conclusive, more difficult to eradicate feeling of not deserving to live, of causing harm by living. As though one could be a virus that would spread. It’s a crazy thought: and maybe just one more justification of the need to escape. One of the familiar feelings of real depression is the inability to discern the difference between the depression itself and one’s drama about the depression.

Albert Camus’s notion–Camus always gets quoted when it comes to suicide–of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill without end, and his conclusion that “we must imagine Sisyphus as happy,” is flat-out crazy talk, unless he means that “we must imagine Sisyphus as happy, otherwise we’ll all kill ourselves!” If this is some kind of practical self-help self-deception, maybe he’s right. But if I were Sisyphus I’d let that boulder roll right over me.

We aren’t in Sisyphus’s position. We do wake up in bed a year later with our partners curled around us, or our three year olds with their heads on our chests, or the winter sun out the window looking sideways across the clusters of pine needles and the long branches of a huge, two hundred year old tree. That, of course, must be what Camus meant to say, what I wish I
could have said to my student, and what I did say to that nineteen-year-old in the hospital: “Just don’t give up.”

Photo by juan23for

I have a friend who, after a date or two, would give the woman he was trying to seduce a copy of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” “It’s like feckin’ magic, Clancy,” he told me, in his churning Irish brogue (which helped him, I suspect, more than the book). “It’s short enough they kin read it in a night. Da next day they’re straight into the sack, I’m tellin’ ya.” The ploy here is to convince a woman that you believe in a certain kind of love–the desperate, romantic sort–and that even if she’s currently with a man, that man is the everyday, sensible, dull “Albert” sort (like Lotte is condemned to marry in the book), while my friend is the desperate romantic willing to die for love, like Werther.

I wonder how many of the women he seduced this way even opened the book. I told this story to a “Philosophy of Literature” class recently, and a woman raised her hand and said: “If I guy even talked to me about a book, rather than just buying me a drink and asking if he could come back to my apartment to hook up, I’d be pleasantly surprised. Just that could get me in the mood.” So maybe my friend was working harder than he had to. But the point is, his plans were never more than sex, and after that he lost interest–he was a cynic about love, just the opposite of Werther’s desperate romantic.

If we know that we are likely to be lied to when being seduced, and yet still want to be seduced, it’s hard to say what’s wrong about the lie. Nothing’s a greater turn-off than the fumbling, desperate would-be lover who spills his guts in an attempt to be loved in return. And a naked request for sex gets you nowhere, at least while the night is young. So maybe it is not the lie itself that is the problem, but the kind of lie one tells–and perhaps also the kind of lie that one encourages, or let’s oneself believe. The question “do you love me?”–asked too soon–invites a lie of the worst kind, and the only honest response might be the one Meursault famously gives Marie in “The Stranger”: “No. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, really.” Maybe we are allowed to lie–and ask to be lied to–in little ways, but not the big ones.

Without seduction there will rarely be falling in love, and we all know that the process of falling in love involves countless little lies: ones we tell ourselves, and others we tell the person we are falling in love with. Even Kant, who insisted that it was always wrong to lie, understood that the process of cultivating intimacy and overcoming mistrust requires us to “cover up our weaknesses, so as not be be ill thought of.” And just as our lover (or our seduced) believes the version of ourselves we present, we may come to believe, through our lover’s eyes, the lies we tell about ourselves. As we seduce or are seduced, we seduce ourselves; in being seduced, we turn a trick or two; in seducing, we may provide the possibility of love.

One day, my Irish friend did find his Lotte (fortunately, he didn’t shoot himself over her). The lies we believe are the lies we’d like to be told. The lies we tell are the lies we’d like to believe.

Byron couldn’t have known about it, but a similar game is played by giant Australian cuttlefish during spawning season. There are not enough female cuttlefish to satisfy the passion of all of the males (males outnumber females by four to one), so the largest, strongest male cuttlefish will gather up harems, leaving the smaller, weaker males to scuttle in frustration around the circle of their (dis)satisfaction. But certain male cuttlefish—cuttlefish are masters of disguise, some of nature’s consummate deceivers—will dress in what amount to borrowed robes, making themselves appear to be female, so that they can sneak into the harem and have their way with as many of the females as they can woo.

This alone would be noteworthy: few other species pretend to be the opposite sex in order to get sex they otherwise cannot obtain. But what is particularly interesting is that the female cuttlefish appear to prefer to have sex with the smaller, cross-dressing males. Some researchers have speculated that the evolutionary advantage here is the preservation of a “smart gene”: the clever cuttlefish who outwit the big louts are selected and their succession guaranteed. Or maybe lady cuttlefish just like their men in drag.

Nietzsche would have liked the story of the cuttlefish. He thought that in all species, indices of intelligence and sophistication corresponded with indices of dissimulation: whether vegetable, insect or mammal, the more advanced and clever you are, the better a liar you are, and the more prone you are to deceive to get what you want. Orchids like the Ophrys (also known as “the prostitute orchid”) have sex by making their labellum appear, smell and even feel like the rear end of a female bee, so that the male bee sees it and supposes a potential mate has simply lit upon the flower to eat and has her head buried deeply into her meal. Cryptostylis, the Australian tongue orchid (what is it about those Australians?!), so closely mimics a female wasp that the male wasp, in the practice of having the orchid’s pollen transferred to it through its vigorous exertions, will in fact ejaculate into the flower.

The point, of course, is that if orchids and cuttlefish lie to get laid—and now we’re talking about the cooler kind of flower, or the cuttlefish wearing the sexier cut of cloth–you shouldn’t feel too badly about the whoppers you tell about yourself at the bar. You’re just working your evolutionary advantages. In fact, it’s the doe-eyed sincere ones who ought to be worried (although innocence and vulnerability can be a very effective ploy: the Sultana achieves her victory over Don Juan, in the end, by bursting into tears). As far as nature is concerned, deception is hot.

Does it matter that a confession is coerced? Our intuition is to say that it’s less sincere, and therefore less meaningful: if you are forced to confess, it lacks the moral punch of a free confession. (”You wouldn’t have told me, you wouldn’t have confessed to us, if you didn’t have to.”) But of course when we are weighing the decision to confess–especially, to the person we’ve wronged–what hangs in the scales is the harm we know the revealed secret will do against the harm we are doing by not disclosing information. Which is heavier: the damage that will be done by the revealed secret, or the manipulation of the beloved’s freedom? The situation is further complicated by the fact that we can look at our own need to confess is different lights. “It will make me feel better if I clean my conscience” can be used as an argument (self-deceptive or no?) against making the confession. And of course, who among us wants to face the likely consequences of a confession, especially when our most cherished good–love–is at stake?

When my present wife and I first started dating I told her: “One day you might cheat on me, and I want you to promise me that if that happens, you will lie to me about it.” She thought it was bizarre and unhealthy at the time, but I still stand by it. The problem, of course, in sticking your head in the sand like this, is that a hyena can come along and bite you in the ass. What if she confessed early on, while there was still time to save things? What if by encouraging her not to confess–making her promise–I was creating the future circumstances that could allow her to fall in love with someone else? I was quick to add: “But if it turns serious, then of course I would want to know.” But by then, as many of us know from hard experience–whether we are the cheaters or the cheated upon–it usually is too late.

And what about the coerced confession? Usually there is at least some coercion in any confession of infidelity: a question about a strange phone call, an email “I opened by accident,” a text you forgot to delete before your real lover–the one you are cheating on–borrowed your phone. “My friend said she saw you at a restaurant with ___. Weren’t you working late that night?” Fight or flight: we usually put both to work, deploying indignation and lies on the spot. But then the decision process starts.

Adrienne Rich argues that lies and secrets always undermine what we are really seeking when we love. Rich: “She may say, I didn’t want to cause pain. What she really did not want is to have to deal with the other¹s pain. The lie is a short-cut through another¹s personality.” Another way of looking at this is from the recent movie “The Invention of Lying,” when the one lie the hero refuses to tell–in a world where everyone else always speaks the truth, and every statement is believed–is the lie that will cause a woman he loves to fall in love with him.

We may lie to seduce, we may lie to control; but at a certain point, when we love, we must be loved in return. When it is given freely, that love is only the kind of love we truly need. That’s the most frightening thing about love. (It’s also one of the comforting things about maternal love: you feel like it’s a positive right, you can demand it, and if it’s not given it’s a moral failing on your mother’s part). And perhaps, to truly love (okay, we have to step carefully, we’re verging on cliché here), is to give someone that freedom in return. Not to shortcut through their personality or to shortchange on your own. To have all of the most important truths out for the beloved to see and make her or his choices accordingly (”most important truths” because, of course, we can never fully disclose ourselves to anyone, including ourselves–we don’t know ourselves in that way).

That’s why, I think, the coerced confession is weaker than the confession that doesn’t have its arm twisted behind the back: because precisely what’s at stake is freedom.

Photo by benklocek

Almost everyone I know has commented on it, it’s no secret—I have, as my wife accurately put it, been sinking a little lower every month. How it works for me is, you hit a black week, and you recover from that a bit, but each recovery is to a point lower than the last, so it’s like a desert of long plateaus, stretching out before you, as far as the eye can see, falling slowly but inevitably into the darkness of the horizon. Hamlet has been even more over-quoted on this than he has been over-quoted on most, but Shakespeare just nailed this one: “I have of late–but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth”. My psychiatrist asks me to pinpoint my worry or anxiety, and in this instance it is utterly beside the point; so much of the point—but how hard it is to express!—is “wherefore I know not.” And it’s too easy, it’s no longer possible for me to say, “I know where it is, it’s sitting in a bottle of fill-in-the-blank over at McCoy’s or Davey’s Stagecoach West.” Fill. In. The. Blank.

I have been working on a book about love and lies—this column helps me to think about it—and one of the chapters I’ve been wrestling with is called “Being a Kid.” There I worry about why I started lying when I did, what it is that turns us into liars at such young ages, and how language and lying connect with our early experience of love. According to most studies, the average child starts deliberately passing off false beliefs as true ones at about age four, but from watching my own children and anecdotal evidence from other parents, I suspect it starts much younger. In any event, by the time we are six or so we’re all experts at it. But when I was talking to my psychiatrist this morning she asked me: “When was the last time you felt this depressed?” My answer was immediate and obvious: when I was a kid. All my childhood I felt this way: in some ways more acutely, because I was more helpless in it; in some ways less acutely, because I did not suffer by the contrast, I didn’t know then (as I do now) that lots of people have days and weeks that go by too quickly. I always hoped—well, prayed, to be honest, I was a religious little kid—that a bus would bounce up the curb and flatten me down, and the sooner the better, I just didn’t have the courage to jump in front of one myself. I longed to find that courage, though. I know I’m not the only adult out there who spent a great deal of her or his childhood wishing s/he were dead.

My psychiatrist pressed on (don’t you hate that habit of theirs?). Surprise, surprise, soon we were talking about my mother. And—don’t worry, my mother doesn’t surf the web, she’ll never read this—I realized that the first lies I told were all to my mother, and they were all told for the same reason: from the fear of loss of love. In a brilliant passage from her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir points out the difference between love as a child and first love: in loving as a child we identify with the love object, we are one with it; in first love we suddenly and unexpectedly encounter the notorious other, we are smitten with what we are not. For Simone it happened when she saw another girl in a park when she was ten.

These are the two sides of love: identification and alienation; satisfaction and desire; wholeness and broken hearts. As small children, de Beauvoir claims (and much of the psychiatric literature on this subject supports her)we know only the identification side of love, the love of belonging, the womb. But she’s not quite right. Part of the price of identification is that, depending upon your mother, she might let you know that the love is in her hands, under her control: that she can push you out any time she pleases. I asked my psychiatrist if she knew the line from Agrado in Almodovar’s gutwrenching “All About My Mother”: “Just don’t disappear again. I like to say good-bye to the people I love, even if it’s only to cry my eyes out, bitch.” (I think I came pretty close to getting it right: it’s a passage I have more or less committed to memory). “Exactly,” she said. I told her a longer story that I won’t repeat here about one time, when I was three, that my mother let me know very well who had the power to disappear and who didn’t. Funny, it occurred to me, that I was now having this particular conversation nine months into my sobriety. Just when my mother would have been pushing me out.

Then, I thought: think about the lies you tell. Not the trivial ones, not lies from politeness, or to explain away a late morning into the office, or about how your friend’s ass looks in her jeans, but important lies, lies you wished you didn’t have to tell, the lies you still regret. How many of them, I wondered—I was asking myself this question, I still am—were told from the fear of losing love? (We tell plenty of whoppers in the hope of gaining love, too, but that’s grist for the mill of another day). And that got me to thinking about Alcoholics Anonymous and its quixotic insistence on “rigorous honesty.” Could it be, I wondered, that there is some terrifying connection between lying, love, and depression? Is that what Freud and his contemporary priesthood have seized hold of in the power of confession? Another over-quoted passage: King James Bible, John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I never liked that line. It has a mean, hateful ring to it. It sounds like an accusation or a threat. I needed my lies and my secrets. They were the only way I was going to preserve, nurture and above all secure my one most cherished good: love.

When I returned to the office, at 11:20 or so, my wife was there—she teaches for us here at UMKC, in the philosophy department—and she sat in my lap while I told her the story and wept. Okay, maybe I cried my eyes out, like Agrado. What the hell, cut me some slack, I’m depressed! “Think of how you love Zelly and Margaret and Portia,” she said (our three daughters). “That’s how I love you. You don’t ever have to prove anything to me.” She was lying, of course, but I believed her. I believe her.

Photo by Katie Tegtmeyer

But how different from these initial glances, estimations, rejections or approvals the process of falling in love! The frightening loss of control in throwing oneself down the stairwell, the choosing to fall in love—but I want to be in love!–suddenly transformed into helplessness: now that I am in love, and my only fear is, is s/he?

One of the most interesting facts about falling in love is that in its first throes—like a similar state, depression—we cannot quite tell what part of the process we are making up ourselves and what part is being thrust upon us. “Is it me inventing these virtues in him, or does he actually have these irresistible qualities? Is it me seeking love, or is it happening whether I want it to or not?” It doesn’t matter. We tell little lies about ourselves, we exaggerate, we fictionalize; meanwhile little lies are being told to us, and we doubt, or believe, or half-believe; we deceive while we self-deceive: it is all part of the natural process. It’s okay not to know whether or not you are falling in love yet; it’s natural to lie a little, that’s part of self-protection and part of allure—the natural world is full of examples of counterfeiting to provoke the interest of a lover; to want to believe is almost always to self-deceive, a measure or two, and that, again, is part of the process, a good part of the process. Trust me, it takes all of us seventeen self-deceptions simply to rise from our beds in the morning. A few extra to facilitate the greatest good we know—love—is well worth a modest compromise in your usual daily commitment to self-knowledge, transparency and rigorous truthfulness (ha!).

Speaking of rigorous truthfulness, you wouldn’t expect it from these dry, skeptical, pipe-smoking bachelors in their badly fitting tweed jackets, many of whom never married (and some of whom—Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are two striking examples—seem almost never to have had sex at all), but philosophers have had quite a lot of interesting things to say about falling in love, starting at least with Plato. Okay, he was in a toga or some sort of 4th century BCE Greek equivalent—whose idiotic idea was it that we give up togas, by the way?!–and I don’t think he ever smoked a pipe, but he had a great deal to say about love, in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. A friend of mine, an Irish playwright, used to give a copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther to a potential new conquest, and he swore it was better than love potion number 9, but I used to like to tell the story Aristophanes offers during the drinking party in the Symposium.

According to Aristophanes, human beings were once joined together in pairs, so that we had four arms and four legs. But this unusual metrical composition and arrangement of limbs made us so speedy—have you ever noticed how everything accelerates when you’re in love, except the time apart from your lover?—that we dared to roll our way up Mount Olympus, challenging the Gods, which prompted Zeus, quite sensibly, to split us apart with thunderbolts (the stitching up of skin he had to do afterwards was pulled together at one point, which is why you have a belly button). But this splitting in two—whether woman from woman, man from man, or man from woman (there were all three sorts)–is why, now, you feel this desperate need to be reunited with your other half, it is why you no longer feel whole, except when you are in love. True love, then—and this is where all this trouble starts, which is later exploited by so many poets and brokenhearted cowboy singers—is when you are reunited with that single person who was once your other half.

But what does all this have to do with falling in love? And, for my purposes today, with the compromises in autonomy, the relaxation of freedoms, and the little lies and self-deceptions that are crucial to falling in love? I think part of Aristophanes’ story is that the reuniting we seek is of another who we were split from in the distant mythological past: that is, he is explaining the need to reunite, the impulse. He does not mean to say that there is only one lover out there for you: he is speaking to, among others, Alcibiades, one of the most beautiful and sought after men in all of Athens, who has known countless lovers. Rather, he is arguing for the feeling we seek when we are falling in love—the emotional bond we experience once we are in love is the feeling of wholeness that truly is absent from us when we are not (speaking only for myself, I can verify this one).

But the process of falling in love is a poetic and dramatic one—Aristophanes is a poet and a playwright, after all—with all of the inventions, poses, ploys and conceits that any good poem or play requires. “Art,” Flaubert taught us, “is the least untruthful lie,” and for Aristophanes the same may be said of falling in love. When you are angry with someone for telling you a lie, you are angry, in part, because he has manipulated you, he has taken a part of your freedom: but of course this taking of your freedom, and your relinquishing of it, is not only essential to the process of falling in love, it’s part of the good of falling in love. We don’t want to be as free as we like to pretend we do. We’d give up half our freedom if only we could take half of someone else’s away—and what contortions of limbs and pinwheelings of arms and legs (and beliefs and brains) won’t we suffer and enjoy in order to accomplish it?

When we are in love, we may discover a kind of truth, even a kind of transparency that goes with wholeness (as I earlier warned, I will have much more to say on this topic). But in falling in love, when not just the antennae but suddenly all the rest of body is on the move, the process of finding and discovering the beloved is a creative one.

Let me close with a few words from poor old Nietzsche, who sought love earnestly only once, so far as we know, from the notorious, brilliant Lou Salome (later lover to Rilke, among others), and was repulsed:

Here [in falling in love] it makes no difference whether one is human or animal; even less whether one has spirit, goodness, integrity. If one is subtle, one is fooled subtly; if one is coarse, one is fooled coarsely; but love, and even the love of God, the saintly love of ‘redeemed souls,’ remains the same in its roots: a fever that has good reason to transfigure itself, an intoxication that does well to lie about itself—And in any case, one lies well when one loves, about oneself and to oneself: one seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect— Here we discover art as an organic function: we discover it in the most angelic instinct, ‘love’; we discover it as the greatest stimulus of life—art thus sublimely expedient even when it lies.

This is why Plato puts his speech in the mouth of the greatest artist in the room: he knows the goal of love—finding that other half (of which there can be more than one). And he knows how we will succeed in the search: through lies, through believing what one should not believe (as one believes in a play), with artfulness, through art. How do we fall in love? We create.

Photo by Scented_mirror

Because the secret-keeping wasn’t the worst part. Secret-keeping, we all know, can be one way we cherish our own personalities, it can be how we reserve a part of ourselves just for us. A secret that is all your own is a bit like a secret between friends: an intimacy. A secret is like a little kiss we give one another, and there is no other way to kiss yourself (this, Freud remarked with characteristic narcissism, was one of our greatest frustrations, that we cannot kiss ourselves). The worst part was the betrayal that went with the deception, the worst part was the guilt: it was just like having an affair.

Eve Sedgwick probably did not invent but at least popularized the idea of an “open secret”: the secret everybody already knows, but no one talks about. The most famous account of an open secret is in H.C Anderson’s little parable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where the villain of the story is not the crafty tailor, nor the foolish Emperor, and of course not the naïve little boy who speaks the truth that everyone already recognizes: “but he’s naked.” The villain of the story is the Emperor’s retinue–his closest circle of protectors–and the public. “Open secrets” have been used by scholars to explain the behavior of ordinary Germans who lived in proximity to Nazi concentration camps (in the work of Andrew Bergerson, for example). Sedgwick uses the idea to show how society can exert pressure upon gays, lesbians and others who have sexual identities in the minority (are we so sure about that, these days?) to remain in the closet. But we are surrounded by open secrets of every description: we all know, and participate in, deceptions that are used to maintain the fabric of ordinary life. Sometimes it is an individual who is collapsing, sometimes a group; sometimes it is a fact too ugly to face; sometimes it is a truth we all agree to forget; sometimes, as Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, it is simply an enormous collective silence.

But back to my family and our secret drinker. S/he is one of the most beloved members of our family; if s/he came out with her/his drinking it would be accepted by everyone in the family, by some with relief: it is sad to watch secret drinking, it makes you worry that the beloved is sinking deeply into loneliness, and watching lying when you know it’s lying is almost always sad, when it’s not evil (evil to lie, and evil to passively watch). Others in the family would no doubt react with anger or even (feigned) indignation: “But you promised you weren’t drinking!” That indignation, that slap-in-the-face, that reminder of the lies and broken promises, is what the secret drinker fears most of all.

One drinks because of addiction; one drinks in secret because of fear of rejection, because of that most terrifying loss, the loss of love. And there is a desire to punish the secret drinker. We all love to rake a liar over the coals (the will to moralize is a will to cruelty, Nietzsche said; the same sentiment was later repeated by a very different philosopher, Bertrand Russell). But after the initial onslaught I think even the angry ones would settle down and feel the relief that comes with a secret exposed. A secret is not a lie: the secret-keeper withholds information, while the liar actually offers false information. But both try to control your belief-structure, and thus your decision making.

When we are asked before entering the witness box “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” (absurd request! As if that were ever possible! For God only, perhaps, and He seems awfully good about keeping secrets, including such juicy ones as whether or not He exists), the burden of truth is correctly placed upon us because the jurors must be as close to the facts as possible in order to make the most adequate judgment. We make our choices based on information, and both the liar and the secret-keeper try to control that information, thereby controlling our choices. Our indignation with both secrets and lies stems at least in part from this, the manipulation of our freedom, the undermining of our autonomy.

So why don’t we out our secret drinker? Two of us tried, quietly and kindly, at one point, and s/he more or less admitted what was happening; but the behavior went on, and we went back to our old ways of being. I know—dread knowledge!—that were I to start drinking again (may I never), I could keep it secret, and that in time it would evolve into an open secret, and that again perhaps only those who are very closest to me might be partially deceived, but that everyone else would understand what was going on, and would go along. And outing, at the end of the day, seems vicious. It’s hard to know when we should tell the Emperor that he has no clothes, and for how long we should allow him to parade down Main Street, in his resplendent, humiliating nakedness.

S/he doesn’t seem depressed (or at least no more than the rest of us, and hell, we’re all medicated in one way or another), doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the state I was in when I walked into that closet at ten or eleven in the evening. (And the truth is, I do remember feeling
 pretty damn determined: it’s just hard to admit that now, because I have three daughters, so it’s a very shameful knowledge). We love our secret drinker, our open secret. Could it be we love our open secrets themselves? Nietzsche, again, said we have grown too mature, too wise, too merry, to believe that the truth remains after it has been stripped bare of its veils. Maybe the open secret is the truth? Maybe that’s part of the love? I have not sufficiently discussed the drinking of our own secrets, as we drink one another’s. That, too, sounds like a dangerous potion for love.

Photo by Duquesa Mercedes

The hope many of us cherish—while doubting it will ever be satisfied—is that in love we can find the transparency between selves that we all long for, the intimacy that we lost with our mothers when we were very young, perhaps just after leaving the womb, or perhaps, as Adam Phillips argues in “The Beast in the Nursery,” when we begin to learn to speak (on this account language, not implausibly, begins the process of separating us from love and truth both—while initiating us into the possibilities of a new kind of love and a different kind of truth).

We want to believe Diotima’s promise: that in love we will find the truth. We will be able to let all our guards down, remove all of our masks, and at last, in seeing someone else for who she truly is, be seen for who we truly are. And indeed, falling in love often feels just this way; and as a marriage grows, very slowly, it can feel, with luck, that truth might blossom there one day (and who knows what kind of fruit?). It’s a dream we all share, and would hate to awaken from. Moreover, no one likes to be deceived in love, and truthfulness between lovers is reasonably understood to be of the utmost importance, because without truthfulness we cannot trust. Think, again, of your mother, and that ghastly first time she told you, “Now I can’t trust you anymore.” How much you would have given for a vacuum cleaner to suck up from her mind whatever little sin you had committed, so that you could have her trust and her love back. We tend to think that any lie is a betrayal of trust, and lies in love are the worst of all. How many love affairs have failed because of the trust broken by a lie?

But consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, first called to my attention (in this context) by Harry Frankfurt’s “On Truth”:

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

The first two lines are a delightful double-paradox: lying, she swears she is made of truth, and he believes her, though he knows she’s lying. But for him to believe her he can’t know she’s lying: a lie only works when we don’t believe it. And her lie is that she is made of truth: she lies about the fact that she is lying (she goes on to tell some other lies, too, that he also chooses to believe). Even ordinary self-deception—when we lie to ourselves about something—is often considered to be paradoxical by philosophers: how can I both believe a proposition and at the same time know it to be false? (And yet we all know we do it all the time—without at least half a dozen self-deceptions most of us couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning). Nietzsche insisted that lying between persons is, relatively speaking, the exception: how we learn to lie, he proposed, is by lying to ourselves, and we are far more expert at that than at lying to others. But if we are experts at the pretzel-logic that enables us to believe the lies we tell ourselves, how does one believe a lie someone else is telling him, while knowing it’s a lie? Here Shakespeare stacks up the paradoxes: next his narrator admits that he lets his lover believe that he believes her lies so that she will think he is young, which is also the lie she is telling him (that he is young), and he uses his acting like he believes her lie to convince himself of the lie she is telling him (“thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young). This is so subtle, so convoluted, so hilarious, and yet so true to the phenomenology of how love actually works that suddenly we remember why, from just a few lines, Shakespeare was the greatest writer—the greatest thinker?—the English language has ever produced.

It get’s better yet: “O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust”: not in trust, but in seeming trust, and not one of love’s habits—controversial enough—but love’s best habit. That is, real trust in love comes in trusting even when we know there may be some grounds for distrust, when we recognize that complete trust is an illusion and should not even be a goal for the best lovers. To truly trust is to seem to trust, to trust with the acceptance of doubt, to be willing to extend the feigning of trust while hoping, even expecting, that the feint will be returned. I remember when I was first falling in love with my wife, and I told her, “If you ever cheat on me—and you might, it happens—just don’t tell me.” There was a difference of twelve years between us, she was 21 and I was 33, and she thought this was utterly bizarre, and even a bit hurtful, not to mention unhealthy. But now, nine years later, I think she would agree with Shakespeare. The point is not that I think my wife has cheated on me in the intervening nine years: the point is, I don’t know if she has, and I sincerely don’t want to know. If she has she has, if she hasn’t she hasn’t, but we are still together, and I trust to protect me from it, if she has. It is a kind of “seeming trust,” but Wallace Stevens got it right when he wrote “let be be finale of seem”: sometimes the being is in the finale, the climax, of the seeming. Or, as Nietzsche teaches us, the profundity of the Ancient Greeks was in the fact that, at least prior to Plato, they were content to let appearances be enough, they didn’t want truth’s veils withdrawn, they understood that “the naked truth” was not what we lovers desire.

Of course, Shakespeare saves the best two lines for last:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

There is the lovely pun on “lie,” Shakespeare at his best and most playful, and the introduction of “flattery,” the most common and the most harmless form of lie. Flattery is crucial here, because of course we flatter one another all the time—even politeness is merely formalized flattery—but in flattery (as in politeness) we all recognize what is going on, the lie succeeds while being recognized as a lie. Language acts in many different ways, and so do lies: not every lie is of the bald-faced-I’m-trying-to-cruelly-manipulate-you-for-my-own-eveil-ends variety, and the lies of love are rarely of this type. When we are falling in love we tell one another and ourselves so many lies—who among us hasn’t had the feeling, while falling in love, of “wait, but aren’t I making this all up?”—and yet the lies are an essential part of the process. We are faulted by our lies, but our lies recover us from our faults, and the lies, flatteries. We see through all of this, and yet we do it, and the lies work, and we love.

Photo by a hundred visions and revisions